Story: Gold and gold mining

Page 1 – As good as gold

All that glisters

Although rumours and traces of gold surfaced in New
Zealand as early as the 1820s, the first European discovery
of payable gold is attributed to Charles Ring, a Tasmanian
who found it at Driving Creek near Coromandel township in
1852. Discoveries near Collingwood in Golden Bay (1856),
Gabriels Gully in Otago (1861), Wakamarina in Marlborough
(1864) and at Greenstone Creek on the West Coast (1864)
followed. Not all discoveries translated into major finds.
The ones that did were on Coromandel Peninsula, in Otago and
on the West Coast, where there were significant gold rushes
followed by decades of mining.

The early mining of the 1860s in Otago and on the West
Coast was mainly undertaken by individuals working alluvial
deposits (river gravels). In three separate years in the late
1860s and early 1870s the amount of gold won exceeded 20,000
kilograms. These totals have never been bettered. From the
1870s mining became more mechanised. Companies were floated,
and dredges and sluicing ventures won more and more gold.
Underground mining, which tunnelled out quartz veins that
were crushed to release their gold, boomed on the Coromandel
Peninsula and West Coast from the 1870s.

Gold mining had declined by the 1920s, and from the 1950s
it was a very small industry. The rise of gold prices in the
late 1970s brought about a revival, with new technology
allowing opencast pits to be dug in Otago and on the
Coromandel Peninsula in the 1980s and 1990s.

How much gold?

No one knows exactly how much gold has been found in New
Zealand. Official records show that up to 2003 a total of
998.71 tonnes had been mined – about 0.8% of all the gold
mined in the world. Because gold-production records have been
collected in different ways over the years there are gaps in
figures and inconsistencies. Available figures show that up
to 2003 a minimum of 312 tonnes had come from the Coromandel
Peninsula, 274 tonnes from the West Coast, and 265 tonnes
from Otago.

The two major booms in production were in the 1860s
(alluvial gold won by diggers) and in the decade after 1900
(underground hard-rock mining). There was a smaller boom
starting in the late 1980s (opencast hard-rock mining).